Eventalizing ‘blackness’ in Colombia

Dissertation Proposal

Eduardo Restrepo

Department of Anthropology,

University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill

April 2003

Eventalizing ‘blackness’ in Colombia

“[...] la elección y la critica de una concepción del mundo constituyen por sí mismas un acto político”

Antonio Gramsci (1970: 367).

“If the black subject and black experience are not stabilized by Nature or by some other essential guarantee, then it must be the case that they are constructed historically, culturally, politically […] ”

Stuart Hall ([1989] 1996: 446).

Statement of the Problem

The notion —nowadays relatively widespread in Colombia and which appears ‘natural’ for many people— that the black populations that inhabit the rural area of the Pacific region constitutes an ethnic group, with its own ‘culture,’ ‘territory,’ ‘ethnic identity,’ and specific rights did not simply drop from the sky ready-formed. On the contrary, this notion was historically and politically configured. In fact, the first half of the nineteen-nineties witnessed the emergence and consolidation of unprecedented forms of black ethnic organization in the Colombian Pacific (Grueso, Rosero and Escobar 1998, Wade, 1995, 2002a). Throughout the decade, these organizations achieved recognition of their collective ownership of large territories covering hundreds of square miles (Oslender 2001). Networks of organizations throughout the region both empowered local communities to negotiate with the State and constituted a collective mechanism for defense against the capitalist extraction of natural resources that has historically prevailed in the region (Escobar 2001). These organizations succeeded in configuring a novel and paradigmatic model of ethnicization of blackness in Colombia (Pardo 2002, Restrepo 2002a). As Peter Wade recently noted (2002a), the dimension of this articulation of blackness and empowerment of local communities remains unique in Latin America. However, similar processes have taken place in Brazil and Ecuador (Arruti 1999, Sanson 1999, Walsh 2002).

This ethnicization process was originated in the northern part of the Pacific region, specifically in the Atrato River, during the mid-eighties (Pardo 1997, Woutes 2001). For the first time in the national or regional political imaginary, those who had been thought of as poor black peasants, with backward life styles urgently needing of the benevolent hand of development, began to be visualized and articulated as an ethnic group with traditional production practices environmentally sustainable, a territory, an ancestral culture, and an ethnic identity and rights analogous to those existing for the indigenous communities (Escobar 2001, Wade 1999). As John Anton Sánchez recently argued (2003), this process constituted an ‘ethnic revolution,’ which has radically changed the ‘political arena’ of the region through the empowerment of local ethnic political subjects.

This ethnic discourse and organizational strategy, originally locally bounded to the Atrato river, reached the national level with the change of the Political Constitution.[1] In 1991, according to the new Political Constitution, the Colombian nation was defined as ethnically and culturally plural. In other words, multiculturalism became a state policy. This policy involved significant transformations in the politics of representation of the Colombian nation. The Transitory Article 55 (AT 55) of this Constitution included a the definition of black communities as an ethnic group and, in consequence, introduced a radical shift in their location into what Wade (1997) has called ‘the cognitive and social structures of alterity.’ This Transitory Article modified the state’s ‘grid of intellibiligility’ though which blackness was articulated in the ‘imagination of nation.’ The well-known Law 70 of 1993, which developed the AT 55 into law, constituted the basis upon which the Colombian state specifically recognized a set of territorial, economic and cultural rights for black communities as an ethnic group.[2] As activists often highlight (Cortés 1999: 132), the AT 55 and Law 70 were not a simple concession on behalf of the Colombian political elite, but the consequence of the pressures of different black organizations as well as their confluence and alliance with the increasingly empowered indigenous movement.[3]

Therefore, the ‘black community’ as an ethnic group has been made possible through arduous political, conceptual and social processes involving the inscription of ‘blackness’ in a novel ‘diagram of subjugated alterities.’ This diagram implies crucial ruptures with the previous articulations of blackness. The main rupture introduced by this new articulation of blackness refers to the notion that the black rural population in the Pacific region constitutes a radical other, that is, a minority ethnic group, with its own culture, territory, ethnic identity, and specific rights. Nevertheless, this new inscription of blackness in the social and political imaginary has been articulated from previous regimes that have not disappeared, but which are differentially and contradictorily amalgamated in the current diagram of subjugated alterities. My dissertation is a genealogy of these regimes in Colombia.

Research question

My research examines different ‘regimes blackness’ and their relationships with ‘subjugated alterities’ and ‘modalities of governmentality.’ As I will explain, the notion of ‘regimes of blackness’ is a conceptual attempt to eventalize ‘blackness’ avoiding the assumed continuities and the obliteration of the historical specificities. This eventalization is a theoretical intervention in order to analyze how ‘blackness/black’ has been historically articulated in relation with specific diagrams of ‘subjugated alterities’ and certain ‘modalities of governmentality.’ ‘Subjugated alterities’ are those ‘alterities’ produced as such in concrete arrangement of relations of forces and games of truth. They are specific ‘problematizations’ of the ‘social body’ that, thought qualified/authorized knowledges, establish strategies and operations of division, distribution, hierarchization and segregation. ‘Modalities of governmentality’ refers to a specific form of power (different, for example, of sovereignty or discipline) that operates through bio-political technologies of regulation of populations. Although the ‘state’ has become an important locus of governmental apparatuses, they are not circumscribed to the ‘state.’ In this sense, governmental does not overlap with ‘state’ or government in the narrow sense.

Thus, my research focuses in the description of the kind of relationships that may exist among ‘regimes of blackness,’ ‘subjugated alterities’ and ‘modalities of governmentality.’ More specifically, there are three interwoven aspects of this question that will orient my research. First, are there any historical conjunctions between transformations in ‘regimes of blackness’ and changes in ‘subjugated alterities’? Second, if this is the case, in what specific ways are these articulations associated with ‘modalities of governmentality’? Finally, could one establish then a relevant relation between significant mutations in those ‘regimes of blackness’ and transformations in those ‘modalities of governmentality’?

As I will address in my methodology, in order to explore these questions I have identified some analytical pivots or points of entrance. Starting with the most recent ethnicization of black communities, I will examine back other four different moments. 1) The emergence of an anthropology of ‘blackness’ in the second half of the twentieth century and its articulations with the governmental apparatuses. 2) The eugenics movement in the first decades of twentieth century associated with the increasingly medicalization of society and programs such as immigration policies and hygienic campaigns. 3) The early nineteenth century movement of independence led by a creole elite in its configurations of nation and its abolitionist dilemmas. 4) The theological debates and descriptions that took place in the foundational moment of the ‘first modernity’ and their relationships with the practices of government of colonial populations.

Working hypothesis

My general working hypothesis is that, from the sixteenth century up to the present in what today is Colombia, one can not only identify different historical conjunctions between ‘regimes of blackness’ and ‘subjugated alterities’ (anchored, for example, in ‘caste,’ ‘race,’ and ‘ethnicity’), but also that in order to understand the emergence and dominance of a given ‘regime of blackness’ it is pertinent to trace its correspondences with the shifting ‘modalities of governmentality.’

Conceptual scaffolding

“[…] any effort at empirical description takes places within a theoretically delimited sphere, and that empirical analysis in general cannot offer a persuasive explanation of its own constitution as a field of inquiry […] theory operates on the very level at which the object of inquiry is defined and delimited, and that there is no givenness of the object […]”

Judith Butler (2000: 274)

Most academic conceptualizations are configured beyond the febrile (and sterile) debate between ‘constructivism’ and ‘essentialism’ that signed the academic labor two decades ago (Mato 1996). However, there are different (and sometimes incommensurable) horizons of theorization of the ‘constructedness’ of those social categories in general, and race and ethnicity in particular (Comaroff 1996: 165). Moreover, although many scholars predicate the historical ‘constructedness’ of social categories (Norval 1996), there is a significant tendency to de-historicize (in the sense of de-eventalize as argued by Foucault[4]) their specific analyses.[5]

Rather than subsuming my research to one or more of the several approaches to ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ that dominate the analysis of ‘blackness,’[6] my dissertation is an attempt to eventalize blackness. Eventualizing blackness constitutes a theoretical intervention in order to both ‘de-racialize’ and ‘de-ethnicize’ the political and conceptual imagination. Although this destabilizes widely accepted assumptions of ‘black/blackness,’ the task is to trace other relations and genealogies of domination, exploitation and subjection that have been silenced because the a priori of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity.’ ‘Regimes of blackness,’ ‘subjugated alterities’ and ‘modalities of governmentality’ constitute the three most relevant instruments of my toolbox.

a) ‘Regimes of blackness’

‘Regimes of blackness’ is an analytical category inspired by my reading of Michel Foucault, which has been shaped by Deleuze’s (1988) punctuations. First of all, by ‘regime of blackness’ I mean that ‘blackness’ must be analyzed as a discursive and non-discursive formation. ‘Regimen of blackness’ as a discursive formation is not an attempt to ‘textualize’ (a la Derrida)[7] ‘blackness/ black.’ Nor is ‘blackness/black’ the effect of a frozen binary opposition defined by its textualized negativity in a ‘metaphysic of presence.’ Contrary to any sort of textualization, discourses are understood as practices linked to certain conditions, obedient to certain conditions of existence, susceptible to certain transformations, as well as being part of a system of correlations with non discursive practices. While ‘blackness’ appears as a discursive formation that is articulated with a set of non-discursive practices, ‘black’ is, paraphrasing Foucault’s well-known statement about ‘sex’, a speculative element necessary to its operation. Thus, ‘black’ must be understood as historically subordinated to ‘blackness.’ Thus, ‘black’ does not exist, as such, independent of the discursive and non-discursive formations that have historically and differentially constituted it. In fact, not only has ‘black’ changed through time and place, but what matters is to describe its multiple locations and transformations into a particular discursive formation, as well as its relations with non-discursive practices.

A relevant consequence is that ‘black’ does not have a clear or unique referent in the ‘real world.’ Rather than trying to find this pristine referent outside of, and previous to, any discursive event, one must focus on the description of the plural, contradictory and overlapping discursive (articulable) and non-discursive (visible) practices that have constituted ‘blackness’ as such. Therefore, ‘black’ refers to specific fields of discursivity and visibility that constitute its conditions of existence and transformation. Thus, the question that concerns us is not a supposed referent that determines ‘blackness,’ but what kinds of objects, practices and relationships have been made possible by the different ‘regimes of blackness.’ In this sense, as Foucault would argue, ‘black’ is a relation of a non-relation. Nor is it a conventional ontology of the true essence of ‘blackness,’ but a description of discursive and non-discursive events in their occurrence and in their conditions of existence and transformation. The goal is not a hermeneutics of hidden meanings behind the speeches and texts, but a careful account of the discursive and non-discursive events and their connections, emergences, ruptures, dispersions and disappearances. Not a history of any idea that has developed slowly, but a material examination of a set of statements and visibilities inscribed in their materiality in speeches, documents, programs and practices. In a nutshell, from a Foucaultian perspective, rather than a phenomenology, a semiotics or a history of mentality, ‘blackness’ must be made the subject of an archeological and genealogical inquiry.

Second, though ‘regimes of blackness’ I attempt to incorporate Foucault’s conceptualization of power in my analysis.[8]In the first place, one must identify how ‘blackness’ is constituted by power relationships, not as a mechanism that works essentially through prohibition, but as a productive set of tactics that transverse the whole social body and other kinds of relationships such as class, nation, race, place-based identities and gender relationships. Thus, the power relationships articulated in ‘blackness’ must not be examined as a superstructural effect of other kinds of relations —‘blackness’ is not subsumed to class. On the contrary, the regimes of power from which ‘blackness’ emerges and is deployed are deeply inscribed in the different spheres and articulations of the social order. Second, rather than understand these power relationships as a substance that someone could possess, or might take over, it is a regime exercised from different points at the same time and with various intensities and directions. In the same way that power relationships are not simply exercised following the dichotomy of ruler/ruled, power relationships through which ‘blackness’ emerges and is deployed are neither the simple expression of the monolithic dominance of a clearly defined and invariant group over other. Therefore, it is pertinent to take into account the tensions, contradictions and multiple articulations that constitute the boundaries and webs of the networks of dominance and resistance among, inside, and across different ‘groups.’ In other words, the power relationships through which ‘blackness’ emerges and is deployed must be analyzed from a non-ontological, multidimensional and positional perspective. Hence, if these power relationships are everywhere —both as dominance and resistance, any social location might embody them. Finally, the power relationships through which ‘blackness’ emerges and is deployed are not the consequence of an individual’s rational choice, but rather, these individuals are in many ways the result of those relationships. Instead of the individual as a primordial and irreducible atom of ‘blackness,’ one must examine how under a specific regime of power certain gestures, discourses, desires and bodies have become markers of ‘blackness’ that produce individuality itself.[9]

b) ‘Subjugated alterities’

‘Subjugated alterities’ is the second conceptual cornerstone that defines my research problem and working hypothesis. ‘Subjugated alterities’ is a conceptualization that avoids those perspectives that subsume alterity as a simple derived or negative term of Identity, which are ineluctability trapped in a ‘metaphysics of presence.’ From those perspectives, not only alterity is collapsed in Identity (in singular and with capital), but that also the plurality and historicity of alterities are obliterated in their reduction to a marked, negative and subordinate value. Thus, they are just a term of the endless permutations of a logocentrinc and formal dichotomy.

Rather, my analytical perspective is an attempt to capture ‘subjugated alterities’ in their positivity, singularity and dispersion. ‘Subjugated alterities’ refers to those ‘alterities’ that have been articulable and visible (a la Deleuze 1988) as such within concrete assembles of relations of forces and games of truth. Instead of assuming preexisting or transcendental ‘alterities’ that have been ‘repressed’ or ‘(mis)represented’ from ‘above’ and from ‘outside,’ ‘subjugated alterities’ are constituted as specific ‘problematizations.’ Following Foucault, “Problematization doesn’t mean the representation of a pre-existed object, nor the creation through discourse of an object that doesn’t exist. It’s the set of discursive or non discursive practices that makes something enter into the play of the true and false, and constitutes it an object for thought (whether under the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.)” (CT, 296). Thus, ‘subjugated alterities’ does not refer to a pristine and previous ‘outside’ of power/knowledge, but neither they are pure imaginary creation of without any ground in the world. Their conditions of existence and transformation are embedded in these relations, even thought those ‘subjugated alterities’ are not reducible to these relations. Rather than a hermeneutics of a certainty, smooth and singular ‘alterity’, the investigation must be defined as a political history of truth[10] in its vacillations, conflicts and plurality. It requires the scrutiny of the regimes of truth in which ‘subjugated alterities’ have emerged, been dispersed, deployed and transformed.

These ‘alterities’ are ‘subjugated’ because the games of truth through which they are constituted as object of thought are those that appeals to qualified and authorized knowledges that establish strategies and operations of division, distribution, hierarchization and segregation of the social body. ‘Subjugated alterities’ constitute, among other possible points through which specific relations of force have passed, a specific diagram or apparatus of capture:“The forces appear in ‘every relation from one point to another’: a diagram is a map, or rather several superimposed maps. And from one diagram to the next, new maps are drawn. […] It is on the basis of the ‘struggles’ of each age, and the style of these struggles, that we can understand the succession of diagrams or the way in which they become linked up again above and beyond the discontinuities” (Deleuze 1988: 44).

‘Subjugated alterities’ are no necessarily radical exteriorities, nor closed social totalities such as the ‘madman’ or ‘criminal’ illustrate (AK). Nevertheless, they can be configured as a constitutive and radical exteriority such as Orientalism (Said 1979) and Third Word (Escobar 1995). ‘Blackness,’ along with other marked and non-marked ‘locations’ (such as indigenousness or whiteness), may constitute a specific case of ‘subjugated alterities.’ It is a matter of empirical research to examine the concrete and multiple assembles in which ‘blackness’ has emerged and operated. However, a specific feature that requires detail examination is that, like sexuality (HS), ‘blackness’ lays embedded in a doubled inscription —in the anatomo-politics of the individuals and in the bio-politics of the populations.

c) ‘Modalities of governmentality’